Integrating Different Scales into Species Distribution Models: A Case for Evaluating the Risk of Plant Invasion in Chinese Protected Areas under Climate Change

Species distribution models (SDMs) based on fine-scale environmental data may reduce the uncertainty in predicting species distributions. However, many scientists have also projected the robust potential distributions of species using environmental data of different scales and found that the potential distributions modeled using SDMs are scale dependent. This may be due to the impact of the scale effect on species richness (as well as on multi-species distributions). To eliminate the impact of the scale effect, we aim to develop an improved method to integrate different scales into species distribution models. We use protected areas as the study regions and propose the hypothesis that there is a spatial element to the threat of invasive species for protected areas under climate change. We use Maxent to compute the current and future invasion ability and invasion inequality of invasive species for protected areas based on the potential distributions of species across different scales to evaluate the risk of invasive species. We find that an increase in the number of present records could reduce the accuracy of SDMs. There is a significant linear relationship between the fine-scale and coarse-scale risk of invasive species of alien plants in protected areas, and an appropriate scale should thus be selected to assess species risk based on this linear relationship of invasive risk. There is a significant relationship between the potential of IAPS to invade protected areas and the invasion inequality of IAPS in protected areas across all scales, and 5.0 arcminutes is the most appreciate scale to evaluate the risk of IAPS for protected areas under climate change based on principal component analysis. We provide new insights into the use of species distribution models coupled with different spatial scales to analyze the regional risks associated with species and to assess regional biodiversity.